Color your digital canvas

33 Digital Painting tutorials – Great list with plenty of help and inspiration if you are starting out in digital painting

The best stuff comes for free

Smashing Magazine Freebies – This is an amazing list of freebies that you are free to use for any project as long as you don’t redistributed or resell them. Which is awesome.
Insights on the Free Economy and how it evovled. Great and very long read.

5 Useful insights into creative traffic

Traffic analysis of a huge blog – This is an amazing insight into where a big blog like psdtuts draws it’s traffic.
Which video’s went viral? – Ever wondered which videos went viral the last few weeks? This site has in detail stats about the most recent videos that have been buzzing around the web.
Finding your commentsEver wondered where you leave your comments? This site keeps track of your movements.

Scariest animal of the month

Meet… I don’t know how to call it… I just know that Hitchcock Birds would fly away from those…

The 5 coolest portfolios found in march

Laurent Perbos – Great concept artist, love those works.
The stray voltage – CoOoOl art blog by ron van der ende.
Tokyo Candies – The coolest strong geisha’s you are about to see, probably not sfw
Silverglimth.com – Beautiful and unique photography portfolio that works without JS or Flash!
Eliza Gauger – Loads of cool sketches

Sarcasm meets youtube

A point rarely is a perfect circle, it’s rather just a small splash, so do it, get to the point. Screw everything else for today.

Sometimes it’s hard to get started in the freelance world. Unless you have been working in the creative industries and leave with a few of the clients your company has been working with, you have to start at zero. Maybe you already own a solid portfolio, maybe you don’t. In any case you have to spread the word, and what is better than creating work that will pay for itself. Here are a few things that you can easily do yourself without the need of finding clients.

Create a Website.

Don’t neglect the place where you start out, no matter what you do, a unique personal website is a must! It does not matter if it is just used as a business card linking to all the free services where you sell/showcase your work, as a blog or if you create a shop there. Your unique domain will make you brandable, display professionalismn and in the best case, will be easy to remember.

Start a blog.

You can start one at wordpress or blogger, join an existing blog as a co-editor or start something up at your own website. A great way to start out is to pick 3 topics you are interested in an write about them, see which blog works best and go from there.
After picking the topic you want to stick to you should create a blog on your own domain. An unique domain will make your website brandable, display professionalismn and in the best case, will be easy to remember and search engine friendly.
Showcase your skills and be aware that it’s your portfolio. A great example is skelliewag. Giving information, building trust and working at all those big blogs such as freelanceswitch, problogger,…
After some time, your blog might actually turn out to earn you some money through recommendations, advertisements, paid reviews, affiliate marketing… there are a million ways to monetize a blog, just get it up and running. In the worst case scenario you have learned how to create a blog and can offer this service, in the best case scenario you create an asset that will produce you money and potential clients en masse.

Take part in T-Shirt contests.

There are plenty of sites offering T-Shirt contests. Threadless, lafraise or designbyhumans are the ones that are really popular. In case you know how to create cool artwork people would love to wear these are your places. You can win between a few hundreds to a few thousand dollars in case your shirt is printed, can add those designs to your portfolio and be part in one of those communities. There are a few popular people such a Ray Frenden or GoMedia who use this to leverage their popularity.

Open a Shop

You don’t need some fancy software, you can simply start building a shop for your creative output. Take zazzle or cafepress for example you can create almost everything with zero budget. You design the items and get a share of the revenue. It’s a great way to find out how well your items would sell and if you should consider selling them yourself.

Create Stock items

I have a love / hate relationship with stock items. It might be cool for a lot of people, but if you are an artists who loves his work, it might be hard to sell it for such a low price. Sure the idea is cool, but somehow it does devaluate work. Besides that you need to create items that will sell well, this might be someone simple or simply high end work that can be used for plenty of things. So usually high quality artistic items sell pretty bad. It’s great for leftovers or simple things that don’t take much time to create.

Create an affiliate product

The easiest way to create an affiliate product is to write an ebook. Just look at freelance switch and their rockstar series. Create something people need to know and are willing to spend a few bucks on. Now you need to give some of your revenue away and pay it to people who are going to promote your book. It eases your marketing efforts and gives other people the chance to earn money. It’s a win-win situation for both sides. A good service to help you selling your ebook is E-Junkie as it is cheap, easy to use and there are a lot of people using it, such as freelanceswitch.

Now that we covered why you should hate stock photography, let’s not make things worse than they are. There are plenty of reasons why people love to create stock items. Here are 16 reasons, and I am sure people can find a lot more than these. Still I don’t think artists will be happy creating stock, as it offers such a low value for unique work that is not easily recycleable.

1. It’s easily accessible
   Accessing a stock site is very easy; you just have to pass a simple test and are free to upload your work. It’s even easier for people who want to buy stuff, as they just have to sign up.

2. Create a portfolio
   A stock site offers you an inexpensive way to create a portfolio where you can already start selling items. You can find potential clients who like your work.

3. Share your work with the world
   You can simply share your work with the world and make it visible.

4. Learn how to create high quality pictures
   Stock sites only accept perfect pictures, at least from a quality point of view. This forces you to really work on your output.

5. Improve your technique
   Improving your technique is a gradual process and you will grow with each picture you upload.

6. Your work generates sales for itself
   Once you have uploaded your work, there is no need to think about it anymore, as people can buy it from that point on.

7. You learn how to create items that sell
   Making money is your main choice, and chasing downloads makes you look for things that sell well. You will either develop your own style, or learn how to successfully copy other people’s work, which everyone does when they start out. After a phase of emulating others you will certainly know what works for you and purse those things more.

8. There is no need to look for clients
   One of the big plus for the creator is that they just have to create their work and have no hustle to find potential clients.

9. Simply upload your work
   Take the picture or create whatever you are doing and upload it, adding a few good keywords. Then it will be either approved or not, nothing more is involved in that process.

10. Selling leftovers is no shame
    In case you don’t want to create stuff for stock, but have leftovers from your regular jobs you can recycle them there.

11. Simple items sell best
    Stock is not sophisticated, it’s actually pretty simple. That’s why generic and simple items sell best- just make a case study yourself and look which items are the best selling items; you are in for a surprise in case you think they have to be artistic. Simple, generic and usable for a wide audience, or of good use for a designer are what sells best.

12. Create a stream of passive income
    Passive income is what everyone strives for. Creating items that can be sold without having to take care of is great. You can earn a few extra bucks each month when you have a portfolio, when you keep on growing it you can earn more than a few bucks.

13. Connect with likeminded people
    The communities around those stock sites are usually pretty cool. You can connect with people, ask questions and socialize.

14. Income will grow with time
    The longer you are in this and the more items you upload, the bigger your income stream can grow.

15. During a crisis people want to save money
    Pretty simple, when there is no big money to be spend people look for cheap alternatives and stock items are exactly that. Stock is a cheap alternative to a professional and unique product.

16. It’s a challenge
    Creating stock is a challenge, as there are many obstacles such as search engines, getting files rejected and the images you think will sell like mad not creating a single sale, while others you didn’t think much off sell like crazy.

People love to create stock, I say that’s wrong, just be honest with yourself and you will agree that you should actually hate stock! Here are 16 reasons and I am sure you can find a lot more to hate the micro stock industry.

1. Stock is uncreative compared to artistic work
   You are not free to do anything, even if you think you are. You want to sell your work and therefore you have to create something that people want to buy.

2. You have to please clients to make sales
   You actually have to please the clients less than when you do contract work, but you still have to create stuff that people want to buy.

3. Technical perfection is more important than artistic vision
   It pretty much does not matter how great your idea is behind your picture, everything that matters is technical perfection and if there is purple fringe or a bit of noise, you are out.

4. You have to promote your work to be really productive
   Creating stock is not enough, you have to promote the stuff yourself to create some real sales.

5. It’s a numbers game
   The more stuff you create the more you can sell. It’s all about having the right item for the right person at the right time.

6. Your work is judged by others
   And I don’t mean by your customers, rather by amateur artists like yourself. It’s not that most people doing this are professionals. They are professional artists just like most of the people submitting there.

7. Some topics sell, others don’t
   Some niches are saturated; others are not interesting for commercial purposes. You can’t change that and you are doing spec work.

8. You have to find trends before others do
   The main thing a contributor has to care about is which thing will be the next big hit and produce according to that.

9. You devalue your work
   You devalue your work, simple as that. You become a mass producer, nothing more. You can put it as you want to, but this process devalues your work as it flood the market with high quality, cheap images.

10. Other people can simply look what sells and copy your work
    Create an awesome piece, you better get the word out before someone else rips off your style and creates stuff like you did.

11. You lose a lot rights for very little money
    You give away a lot of your rights for very little money. Giving stuff away for free is great, but selling stuff for less than it’s worth is simply stupid. Big names save a lot money and you are not even making a name with it.

12. Stock sites are like a factory producing a high output
    Ever wondered why hand-crafted items are more expensive than machine work? It takes time and dedication to produce them, they are unique and people value them far more. How much is a 20$ stock item really worth?

13. You earn less than 50% of a sale
    This is what should everyone really piss off… you earn less than the company, which is ok, but you should earn at least as much as they do. They are not the only ones having costs running servers and people working in the company, you are working your time creating items, you are the one building their content, you should be worth at least 50%.

14. You lose artistic freedom
    You sacrifice your freedom over some cheap work, as you have to create stuff that sells or you can simply stop contributing.

15. You compete with amateurs
    You compete with amateurs who do this for fun and don’t care about the money.

16. You have to be lucky
    You can be skilled, but you have to be a bit lucky, just like everywhere else. Unless you don’t get lucky it’s hard to create top selling items. You have to rank well in the search; otherwise you won’t sell much in high trafficked niches.